Late-night reruns impacting more than viewers

If you’re a night owl who turns on your TV from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., then the last five weeks have been mildly tortuous thanks to the writers’ strike throwing late-night TV into reruns.

Of course, viewers who watch only Leno or Letterman could switch between their reruns, but that doesn't help much when you consider how much of the late-night audience use these shows to keep up on current events.

Since the days of Johnny Carson, surveys have shown that some Americans use the “Tonight Show” monologue as a news source, while potentially millions of others get their news from the guy in the office who repeats all those jokes. And more recently, the "fake news" shows on Comedy Central have become the chosen news medium of some of the under-30 crowd. The absence of new, updated content may be making large parts of the population more misinformed than ever before.

But some late-show staffs are continuing to supply their audiences with fresh material, even if it's not on TV.

For example, the blog LateShowWritersOnStrike.com has become a great source of David Letterman-style humor, and it's almost totally "Top 10 List"-free. But regrettably, the blog is 90 percent dominated by jokes about a single topic — the strike — which will disappoint those who love jokes about Donald Trump's hair.

Impact beyond home viewers
If the home viewing audience is feeling put out by the lack of late-night comedy on TV or off, the live studio audience is locked out. Some serious fans of Jay, Dave and others have built their vacations around attending the shows, and most audiences include large groups with blocks of tickets.

Also locked out are the guests on late-night television, who generally don't do it for the standard network appearance fee. The publicity for the star of a new movie, a band with a new CD or — especially on Comedy Central's shows — an author with a new book can be worth more than paid advertising.

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They've become a source of free advertising that the movie studios, record labels and publishers have come to assume is always there, and for some viewers, those plugs are their best introduction to not just news, but to what's new.

Publicists and marketers are now working overtime to find nontraditional strategies. Daytime TV isn't that nontraditional, but you can expect the usual guests for Jay and Dave to be spending more time with Oprah, Ellen and Regis, and migrating to Martha and Rachael even if they don't know how to cook. And even with sagging ratings for the late-night reruns, some movies that usually run commercials accompanying their star appearances are actually running more commercials.

Some new material
But one late-night venue has returned to supply fresh material for marketers and viewers alike. Carson Daly took a lot of flack for going back into production, although unlike other hosts, he's not a WGA member. Thus, rumor was that if he didn't return, he would lose his own job — and he's the only late-night star who could have been threatened that way.

When he opened his first new show in the wee hours of last Tuesday morning, he promised to explain why he came back, and then made a joke that he was afraid his out-of-date reruns would make the audience think the band Creed had reunited. Definitely a non-union joke.

But then he turned serious and insisted that the only reason was to keep his staff from being laid off, many of whom, he pointed out, had followed him from New York to Los Angeles two years ago.

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Any time a strike by a creative union shuts down production, the other workers — assistants, engineers, camera operators, researchers and many others — are caught in the middle, losing work and income. Ironically, the employees of many late-night TV shows, while the first to be affected, are catching a break, thanks to the high-profile, highly-paid stars.

At CBS, where not the network but David Letterman's Worldwide Pants production company owns both “Late Show With David Letterman and “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson,” Dave is keeping everyone on payroll at least until the end of December. That includes the guy who has done "The Wahoo Gazette" on the Late Show Web site since 2001, where he is now recapping the reruns, doing a kind of alternate universe monologue without punchlines and linking to the strike news Web sites, including the writers' blog.

NBC and ABC kept everyone through November, then laid everybody off with a standard "we'll call you if (not when) we need you again." As the drop-dead date approached, Conan O'Brien told his staffers that he would personally cover their paychecks for a week or perhaps more, according to one report. Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel are doing the same thing. So, for the moment at least, late-night show staffs are actually being paid to not come to work — except for Carson Daly's staff, which is actually working.

Not that it's worth the effort. On his first night back, Daly showed a video of clips of past music guests, then hemmed and hawed for two minutes just to prove that he was doing the show without writers. And the talent that showed up wasn't exactly A-list.

It seems Carson Daly remains generally safe to ignore.

Still, the biggest side effect of the late-night TV shutdown is yet to be seen, as millions of viewers try to find something else to do. Even back in the 1960s, when Johnny Carson was pretty much alone in the time slot, some critics commented that "The Tonight Show" was, for many couples, replacing sex.

Depending on how much of the audience opts for non-television diversions, hospitals across the country could expect a spike in births starting next July.

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